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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 July - 2 August 2000 Issue No. 492 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 July - 2 August 2000 Issue No. 492
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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By Hosny Guindy
I came to know Sabry Ragheb at the beginning of the seventies when he already enjoyed a considerable reputation as an artist. It is from that time that our friendship dates, and it continued uninterrupted over the years. He was both a friend and a mentor, a man whose integrity, modesty and warmth was never compromised by his celebrity or by the loneliness that must inevitably accompany the single-minded pursuit of such excellence. He would remain always dedicated to the near perfect realisation of beauty, light and love.
I spent many hours sitting on a low chair as Sabry Ragheb painted, following the movement of his hands as they gave life to the pigments they manipulated, fascinated by his manner of holding the brush, gripping it at its very tip, a technique that appeared at once fastidious and, as another friend once noted, aristocratic.
Many years have passed since those long sessions, enveloped by smoke, when all my senses would be in concentrated focus on the swift movements of the brush, between palette and canvas. I would ask, naively, what need this mad hurry, this -- as it appeared to me at the time -- unseemly haste. And he would reply, with characteristic modesty, that he did not know. Even more naively, I would continue. "When," I asked, "did he recognise the moment when it was right to sign the canvas?" Many times I watched the brush, as it mixed the required colour and then unhesitatingly select the place where his name would be inscribed, becoming an essential component in the overall design. "There is a moment," he would reply, "when I recognise that all I have inside has materialised on the canvas and there is nothing more for me to add."
I do not know if Sabry Ragheb ever realised just how much I was indebted to him, both as a friend and mentor. Certainly I never told him how much, nor is that debt quantifiable in those kind of calculations that suffice for the crudely material. The times I spent in his studio in Heliopolis, which remained always familiar, always the same, were indeed precious. for in that studio quotidian concerns would slide away, leaving the visitor ample room to dwell on things more sublime.
At the opening of each of his exhibitions I would joke with Sabry Ragheb that no matter how many exhibitions he held my home would remain, always, a permanent exhibition. Now that the day that I long feared has arrived, I pace between the rooms of my small home, seeking shelter from the pain of his loss in the warmth of the colours of his paintings that hang even in every corner.
We tried to offer as much love as Sabry Ragheb himself offered. Perhaps, though, in some sense, we were unable to give all that his noble humanity, so perfectly embodied in his art, deserved. Fate is capricious and the fate that dogs the artist more capricious than most. Now the circle is closed, will he at last begin to receive the attention his life's work merits?
A final word, to both a friend and a master, something I would have hoped to have said personally but which, sadly, I find myself writing: We have always felt -- my wife and daughter no less than myself -- that you were an integral part of our home and family, a fourth member that completed the whole.
Clockwise from top: Ragheb in his studio; yellow roses, among the artist's favourite flowers; literary pioneer Tawfiq Al-Hakim and Yvonne, Ragheb's wife and model
At 1pm, on Saturday 22 July, after a long and painful illness, Sabry Ragheb's weak heart stopped, the spirit finally departing from the body of one of Egypt's most accomplished artists. It left behind an empty frame looking for shapes and colours to fill it, a bunch of roses searching for some new admirer.
Ragheb's story is equally one of pleasure and of pain -- the pain arising from a talent that transformed his life into an instrument for his art, the pleasure incumbent upon that art being a life-long, and often triumphant, love story, a vital solvent in which Ragheb was fully dissolved. And between the pain and the pleasure, the glittering paintings that in his last days he was prevented from producing by his doctors, who deemed the activity risky and damaging to the ailing heart, there were only his wife and model, Yvonne, and his kind daughter; nobody else in his life.
I could hardly have known that my long conversation with him, in which he opened up his memory bank, juggling both ideas and feelings, would be Ragheb's last.
In his flat-studio in Roxy he invariably came out to meet the visitor with a sympathetic look on his face, not severing eye-contact until his visitor had turned to the portraits, the landscapes and the still-lifes that overcrowded the place, always in classically fashioned frames, denoting a historical weight.
On my last visit he lit his pipe, against the protestations of his doctors. "It has become part of my life, how can they stop me from smoking it. At least I'm trying." He hesitated as he blew out a cloud of smoke. "A life-long companionship -- my wife, my daughter, the paintings, the colours and the pipe," he insisted. "If art colleges taught only modern schools of painting, I wouldn't have applied to them in the first place. I love the human being's presence in art -- that has been completely indispensable to me."
Ragheb sits back, submitting to reminiscence.
"André Lut used to lecture us in Rome, where I studied. We most certainly had our debates. After six months he said to me, 'Sabry, you have a classic heart, you must continue as you are rather than trying to alter your style.' And indeed it made sense. If it was a four-legged chair, I couldn't possibly paint it with five legs. Of course, as an artist I could change the position of the chair as I liked, moving any one straight line if it bothered me. By the way, I particularly liked Mancini, Morelli and all of Italy's great artists. Often, after that episode, I would visit Italy simply to benefit from them."
"I look at shapes -- faces, a rose, a length of fabric. And it is out of the feeling that I have for these things that art emerges. Sincere art has its own logic. To mention one example: I remember that we were working on the subject of the café with Lut, who after painting his picture, and attaching a 50 centime bank note to the canvas, asked me democratically what I thought of it. I asked him about the bank note and he explained that it referred to the cost of the drinks at the café. And I pointed out that he had painted the café in a modern style while the bank note remained classic and that there was a consequent contradiction -- something he hadn't consciously reckoned on while painting. But nonetheless, in my view, art remains connected with the audience's understanding of it, and the artist cannot live inside his audience if he does not speak to it in a language it can understand."
When I managed to steer the conversation towards portraiture, Ragheb acknowledged that his fascination with portraits lay behind his adopting an impressionist technique and a colour scheme characterised by fantasy, remembering that even in childhood, when he still couldn't paint eyes, he painted eyeless faces. He identified Ahmed Sabry as a principal influence in this department. Enrolling in the School of Arts in 1937, Ragheb remained in close contact with the painter for 15 years, until he finally graduated in 1952. "I lost ten years due to my fascination with freedom and my travels," he confided. What was the story behind the delay?
He remembered the rivalry between Sabry and Salah Kamel -- with whose son, Youssef, he was unwittingly in competition, due to Sabry's desire to prove Youssef inadequate. He remembers an unkind comment he made about the work of Sahab Almaz, the head of the Egyptian Art Academy in Rome, unfortunately to his face, following which Ragheb was transferred to another school, living a Bohemian life and suffering many problems.
"When I returned to the Academy in Rome in 1948, the great artist Mohamed Nagui welcomed me and I joined the third-year class."
It was, ironically, Youssef Kamel who summoned him back to the School of Arts in 1949, but Sabry insisted on him taking an exam. Yet though the verdict of this assessment was "excellent," Kamel used his influence to prevent Ragheb from joining the fourth-year class, placing him in third year instead. And so it continued.
"I forgive them all, and if I mention this now -- the power struggles of which I was the unwitting victim -- it is only for posterity."
He continued: "How is it possible that enrollment in the arts college be on the basis of a percentage, and how can people study art without models? It is just like taking anatomy out of the medical curriculum -- a very strange thing."
The life class, he insisted, is an indispensable stimulant. In 1959 he remembers an exhibition of 117 paintings, all of which were depictions of his wife. "No one painting was like another, though," the model being, for him, simply an initial stimulant. Although he likes some abstract art, collage and installations do not appeal to him much because they lack human and spiritual dimensions. He remained, always, incorrigibly figurative.
"When I create my colours on the canvas, the spirituality in which Egypt is immersed is always present inside me, an essential aspect of my aesthetic sensibility." Even in landscape and still-life such spirituality invests the painting -- both the end result and the act -- with a palpably human dimension. And the criticism directed at his work -- it is neither modern nor close to the dynamics of social and cultural reality -- he accepted warmly, the way one would accept censure from the beloved. "I receive criticism with love, because that is how I paint and think about painting," he said, our conversation drawing to a close. photos
